Just a quick question about the translation of a simple sentence from “Greek to GCSE” by John Taylor.
The English sentence is “The house has gates.”
I translated this as “ἡ ὀικια πυλας ἐχει.”, but a friend believes it should be “ἡ ὀικια της πυλας ἐχει.”
With regard to definite and indefinite articles, Taylor states that if there is no article (in the Greek) translate as “a”: e.g. “ὁ δουλος” = the slave, and “δουλος” = a slave.
Which version do you reckon is correct?
Your friend probably means ἡ οἰκία τὰς πύλας ἔχει, not τῆς. Regardless, I think that you are correct not to include the article. The version with the article would mean “The house has the gates.”
That mistake was mine. Thanks for your faith in my translation.
I am his friend 
Thanks, Joel! I was confused by Taylor’s commentary.
As Joel’s comment suggests, in this case the Greek use of the definite article is the same as that of English. It might be worth explaining why, however, it does not appear here in either language, as in other contexts the usage is quite different, and a native speaker of a language which does not use articles might like to have this clarified.
The definite article is absent because this is the first time the gates are mentioned, and this is new information for the listener. From now on, the gates will appear with the definite article, because everyone in the conversation now knows which gates they are talking about.
The fact that the house does have the definite article (ἡ οἰκία , not just οἰκία) means that, in context, the person the speaker is addressing must know which house is being spoken about. If they didn’t, they’d be pretty confused - if someone just said to you “the house has gates” you’d probably say “which house?”
For an English speaker this is just obvious and natural, but one of the issues with translating isolated sentences is that it can obscure quite important facets of a language (in the case of Greek an example would be the use of particles). Anyway, an extended version of this exercise might look like this:
ἔστιν οἰκία ἐγγὺς τοῦ ποταμοῦ. ἡ οἰκία πύλᾱς ἔχει. αἱ πύλαι ξύλιναί εἰσιν…
There is a house near the river. The house has gates. The gates are wooden… Here the speaker assumes that the person he’s talking to knows which river he’s referring to. When the identity of the noun is obvious (the sun, the ground, a landmark, things like that) you would just use the definite article straight away.
Many thanks. That is very thorough and very interesting.
I don’t think my reasoning for not including the definite article was anything like your analysis - it just seemed to me that it sounded better without it!
If I do lots of reading (huge amount?) will I get to the stage of being able to do such translations without the detailed analysis?
Thanks Matt. That helps make sense of Taylor’s comment!
Of course, for fun, we could invent some contexts where a “the house has gates” could take an article:
μετὰ τοῦτο δ᾿ εἰς πόλιν ἐξωλῆ ὄντα ἐλθὼν περὶ τοῦ τείχους ἐζήτουν καὶ εὗρον οἰκίαν καλλίστην καὶ μεγίστην. θαυμάζων ἔφην· ἡ οἰκία τὰς πύλας ἔχει.
You can do something like this because ownership is implied in the English “the house has gates” and “the house has its gates” are equivalent, but it’s made definite here in the Greek.
You could also speak philosophically:
τί ἐστι τὸ εἶδος τῶν οἰκιῶν; τοῦτο δὲ τὸ πρῶτον ὁρίζομεν ὅτι ἡ οἰκία τὰς πύλας ἔχει. τί ἐστι τὸ εἶδος τῶν πυλῶν; …
That’s all off the top of my head. I imagine that others could think of more.
Well, in this case its sounding right served you well, so it has something going for it! But of course there are many cases where this won’t be true.
Your question is a difficult one to answer. Some people say they can get an instinct for what’s right in a language pretty much by exposure alone (by watching TV or whatever in the case of a modern language) but sadly that hasn’t been my experience. I have found it necessary to get my head around a concept intellectually and then practise, practise, practise. And by practise I mean producing my own sentences directly in the target language, not only translating or reading. So if you’re learning the comparatives, make up dozens of sentences using that structure - try saying one aloud first, then write it down and go over it looking for errors, then move on to another. Mix up the vocabulary and tenses, as well. It will stick eventually!
I’m really talking about my experience with learning Spanish here, by the way, which I am far more proficient in than Greek. I learned Greek to read sources (I was an ancient history postgraduate student at the time) and therefore neglected loads of topics and skills which I would have loved to have developed further. I remember wishing that I could have a year in which all I had to do was study Greek… Instead I ended up basically abandoning it for the best part of a decade! But you know, I had to earn a living.
Thanks for the explanations and for explaining some of your methods. In my case, I am purely learning Greek (and Latin more successfully) out of pure interest. I retired from work 10 years ago, so I have quite a lot of time, but not quite so much energy, to spend on the two languages. I Latin, I have got to the stage of being able to read intermediate level stuff such as “Ad Alpes” and Fabulae ab Urbe Condita, but Greek is proving to be more of a problem for me. I hope to get to a similar stage eventually.